Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
stellarium is free planetarium software
they can be downloaded from www dot stellarium
dot org
when we first open stellarium up in the upper left-hand corner we see we are
running still stellarium version zero point eleven point three
down at the bottom we see that we are on earth in paris
the thirty-eight m is our altitude
we've got a few of the view of sixty
the f p_s_ is frames per second or how much the screen is being updated
then we have our date and time
july fourth
two thousand twelve at
eight eleven am
we don't see any stars right now
because it still delight in france for this time of day
the time showing is from my computer it looks like it's a nice day there in
france but this is not in actual camera view in france
will see that same field in other locations as well
if i move my arrow the to bottom of the screen
we see a horizontal pop-up menu
if i move it to the left
we see a verticle
pop-up menu
this top icon says location window F6
clicking that opens up our location window
hitting F6
toggles it
on and off
to change location we can scroll through the locations
and just click on one
we can see here in china it's the middle of the night i can also just click
on the map
in australia to middle of the night
and in the US in the eastern standard time zone back where I'm at it's the
middle of the day
i want to create a location
since i live in the eastern standard time zone of the US i'm going to
click in there
and and going to use my altitude of
thirty meters is good
and not in china anymore i want to change that to the us
and
i want to give my location a name
so when i create this frugal computer guy location it'll be in the us
i'll be at this longitude latitude and this altitude
i'd like to make this my default location
so every time i start stellarium
it will start me at
my frugal computer guy location
I need to add this to the list
and there we have it
it's still daylight here
that's why i can't seem stars but at least i'm in the right location for my
time. now I want to change the time so that we can see some stars
this next icon down
has date and time window F5 meaning that I can click this icon or hit F5
to bring up
the date and time window
it's eight am
the default is a twenty-four hour clock
i want to make it about ten pm so i need to go ten hours after noon, so i
do ten plus twelve twenty-two
now it's ten thirty pm
this is what i would see
outside of my house
i look to the south
to looking the other directions, I'm going to use my arrow keys. i'm going to the right
hitting the right arrow
now I'm looking to the west
i'm looking to the north. i'm going to hit my left arrow
that takes me around
back to the south i can also hit the up arrow
and the down arrow
if i want to know more about the starr planet
i can just left click on it
and information comes up in the upper left-hand corner
let's take a look at Saturn
if i hit my space bar
it brings it to the center of the screen
to zoom in on this
i can use page up
I'm zooming in to Saturn
and page down
takes me back out
we'll also notice
that our field of view changed we're now at fifty five
I fI zoom in again if we look at that field of view
we see that those numbers are going smaller and smaller
we're down to
point zero two seven
and then back out
if we use our
forward slash and back slash... the forward slash
zooms us in
the backslash
backs us back out to sixty degrees
to get rid of the information on the screen
right click
putting our arrow
over the horizontal menu bar
if i go down to this lower corner there's a little triangle effect click
on that
it becomes a square
now when i move my hero or way from the menu bar
it stays in place
taking a look at it we see some are white in some are gray
if they are gray they're turned off if they're white to turn on
to turn the constellations
we come down
to these lines and see constellation or we can type in
the letter c will turn on the constellations
to know which ones were looking at we want to see the constellation names
and that can be done with v or our next icon
and those are pretty good
and at this point we can still use our arrows to look around the screen
and to zoom in
and zoom out
some of these constellations like this
mine here... it's kind of difficult to know what that is
so what the people at Stellarium did is
they created some artwork
Let's turn that on either by clicking
the letter r
or this icon
so we can now see the constellation at this line represents
to minimize this menu
let's turn the square back into a triangle
so if i look out to the west tonight
these are the constellations i can see